Five Days In The Snow

An 85-year-old woman, alone with her cat, took a wrong turn in a storm. No one had any idea where they were.

- Ruby Stein

Ruby | Day One

“You remember how to get back on the highway, right?” my granddaughter Alee asked as she loaded three bags of clothes for a consignment store in my hometown in the back seat of my little red Sentra. The weather in Gypsum, a small ranching town nestled in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, was clear and cold. “You just take a right off the main road.”

I nodded as I got in.

“I’ve got my phone. I’ll stay in touch!” I said. I waved goodbye and pulled out of Alee’s driveway. “Here we go, Nikki!” I told my cat, who had settled down on the passenger seat. “Lord, help us get home safely.”

My house was more than 200 mileseast, in Akron, on the other side of the Front Range. I’d had a great few days visiting with Alee, her husband, Joe, and their four children. I smiled thinking of my great-granddaughter Kimberlee, who’d insisted I take some sweet rolls for the road. I was sad to be leaving early, but the news was predicting a storm later that night. A few years earlier, I’d had a bad experience getting stuck near the EisenhowerJohnson Tunnel for five hours during a storm. No way was I risking that again!

Gypsum is so small—with a population of only about 6,000—it has only one main road. I drove through the small downtown, headed for the mountains. The buildings lining the road became sparse as I left the town behind. When I’d driven into Gypsum a few days earlier, Alee had met me at the highway and driven my car the rest of the way to her house. The bright red roof of the kids’ elementary school was the first thing that looked familiar. I turned left.